Agile Adaptations

I've been following the Lean-Startup movement since I wrote about it in Framing Product Development. In the Spring of 2010 I was jazzed up about Lean-Startup following a gathering at DevJam with a small group of friends where we viewed a simulcast of the Startup Lessons Learned Conference --the brain child of Eric Ries.

Yesterday I tweeted:

Several RT'd. Others commented about this distillation of ideas.

My Admission

 My Tweet was cribbed from Abby Fichtner's (a.k.a., Hacker Chick) screencast Pushing Agile to the Next Level. The side by side comparison of Agile and Lean Startup (below) is a concise and helpful representation of an evolution of thinking in the Agile software development realm.

Of Hacker Chicks's excellent slide and presentation, I pass on Alan Cooper's tweet - ostensibly directed at her vision of the evolution of the Agile movement...

Most accurate, succinct, and wise demarcation of the two disciplines. ~ Alan Cooper

Agile 2.0

I share Hacker Chick's vision. For me Lean-Startup has become Agile 2.0. True to the spirit of Agile, movements must adapt and adopt, or die. I recognize that Hacker Chick has shown the Agile community a bridge to the future. The challenge for any ponderous old-paradigm organization producing custom software products is

How to behave like a startup?

Lean-Startup teaches us to create the infrastructure necessary to test our business models (our products). That means getting it into the hands of the users, testing hypotheses (fail early / fail often), and pivoting toward viability -- like a heat-seeking missile follows heat.


Previous Posts About Lean-Startup For those new to Lean-Startup, I've written several posts on my understanding the constituent principles:

• Framing Product Development
• Startup Pivoting and Software
• Hypothesis Testing and Software